In trust relationships, one person has a ‘beneficial interest’ in another’s performance. The former not only would but should benefit from the latter’s action, and the latter has a ‘fiduciary duty’ toward the former to so act. But where that act would otherwise be wrong, the first person’s beneficial interest would be providing a pro tanto reason for the second person to do something that is pro tanto wrong. That reason can – and should – be removed by the former (...) renouncing their beneficial interest in the latter’s pro tanto wrongful action. Doing so would cancel the fiduciary’s excuse for wrongdoing on the beneficiary’s behalf. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch out and assess two readings of Bentham's theory of meaning, one reductive (Section 2), the other quasi‐pragmatist (Section 3)—both implicating Bentham's ontological and epistemological views. I focus on the way these readings would understand Bentham's analyses of claims in moral and political discourse that rely on putatively normative notions such as obligations and rights, good and bad, and what ought to be the case. I conclude the paper by suggesting tentatively that the independent merits of (...) both readings could signal an irreconcilable tension at the heart of Bentham's thought (Section 4). (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 386-414, December 2021.

The will theory of rights has so far been considered incapable of capturing individual rights under criminal law. Adherents of the will theory, therefore, have defended the claim that criminal law does not assign rights to individuals. In this article I argue first, that criminal law does assign individual rights and second, that the will theory of rights may enhance our understanding of these rights. The two major implications of the account are: a volenti non fit iniuria principle for criminal (...) law, and a theoretical framework for an idea of punishment as restitution. (shrink)

Much of the debate concerning political obligation deals with the question of which, if any, moral principles could make obedience to the directives of the government a matter of obligation. What makes political obligation political has not received attention in the literature on the topic. In this article I argue that the lack of systematic reflection on what makes political obligation political is responsible for the failure of a number of influential theories of political obligation. I demonstrate this failure using (...) the consent theory of political obligation as my major example. I conclude my analysis by formulating some positive conditions that a successful principle of political obligation should satisfy. (shrink)

The PRIME Institute of the College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota, recently released preliminary research findings indicating a trend of extraordinary pharmaceutical industry pricing of drug products in the United States (U.S.). According to researchers at the PRIME Institute, such extraordinary price increases are defined as any price increase that is equal to, or greater than, 100% at a single point in time. In some instances, PRIME Institute researchers found that drugs exhibiting extraordinary price increases are categorized as "orphan drugs" (...) (or blood-related biologic treatments) and often life-saving or life-sustaining for treating the cause or symptoms of diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S., or where there is prevalence of less than 5 per 10,000 people afflicted with a disease or symptoms in the community. Because of extraordinary price increases for orphan drugs — some exceeding 1000% at a single point in time -this article addresses two interrelated questions: Are extraordinary orphan drug price increases socially responsible behavior? If so, are the pharmaceutical industry's policies providing orphan drug access to American consumers in dire need of available life-sustaining and life-enhancing pharmaceuticals considered "socially responsible" behavior? The author concludes, after an interdisciplinary analysis of the legal, economic, sociopolitical, and ethical dimensions of orphan drug pricing, that they are not socially responsible – unless justified by cost and availability of health care marketplace/patient options. Furthermore, the author recommends a socially responsible industry strategic approach to insure that patients ultimately receive -regardless of cost -timely access to life-saving and life-sustaining orphan drugs. (shrink)

William Perm summarized the Magna Carta thus: “First, It asserts Englishmen to be free; that's Liberty. Secondly, they that have free-holds, that's Property.” Since at least the seventeenth century, liberals have not only understood liberty and property to be fundamental, but to be somehow intimately related or interwoven. Here, however, consensus ends; liberals present an array of competing accounts of the relation between liberty and property. Many, for instance, defend an essentially instrumental view, typically seeing private property as justified because (...) it is necessary to maintain or protect other, more basic, liberty rights. Important to our constitutional tradition has been the idea that “[t]he right to property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” Along similar lines, it has been argued that only an economic system based on private property disperses power and resources, ensuring that private people in civil society have the resources to oppose the state and give effect to basic liberties. Alternatively, it is sometimes claimed that only those with property develop the independent characters that are necessary to preserve a regime of liberty. But not only have liberals insisted that, property is a means of preserving liberty, they have often conceived of it as an embodiment of liberty, or as a type of liberty, or indeed as identical to liberty. This latter view is popular among contemporary libertarians or classical liberals. Jan Narveson, for instance, bluntly asserts that “Liberty is Property,” while John Gray insists that “[t]he connection between property and the basic liberties is constitutive and not just instrumental.”. (shrink)

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's account of legal rights is now 100 years old. It has been much discussed, and remains very influential with philosophers and lawyers alike. Yet it is still sometimes misunderstood in crucial respects. This article offers a rigorous exposition of Hohfeld's framework; discusses its claims to comprehensiveness and fundamentality, reviewing recent work on the topic; and highlights the argumentative uses of Hohfeld's most important distinction.

It is commonplace to criticize utilitarianism on the ground that it does not take moral rights seriously; that it cannot account for the rights we have, and for their role in constraining our pursuit of the overall good. Wayne Sumner does not directly address this criticism in The Moral Foundation of Rights. Instead he attempts to show that consequentialism can defeat nihilism about rights: the view that there are no moral rights at all.

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the international implications of liberal theories which extend justice to sentient animals. In particular, it asks whether they imply that coercive military intervention in a state by external agents to prevent, halt or minimise violations of basic animal rights can be justified. In so doing, it employs Simon Caney's theory of humanitarian intervention and applies it to non-human animals. It argues that while humane intervention can be justified in principle using Caney's assumptions, justifying any particular intervention on (...) behalf of animals is much more difficult – and in present circumstances impossible. If these claims are correct, a number of important conclusions follow. First, all states lack legitimacy because of the horrors that they inflict upon animals. As a result of this, all states are prima facie liable to intervention by external agents. To remedy this situation, all states have the responsibility to massively transform their relationsh... (shrink)

The overall aim of the article is to analyse how the universal right to education have been built, legitimized and used. And more specifically ask who is addressed by the universal right to education, and who is given access to rights and to education. The first part of the article focus on the history of declarations, the notion of the universal right to education, emphasizing differences in matters of detail—for example, the meaning of ‘compulsory’, ‘children’s rights’ or ‘parents’ rights’—and critically (...) examining the right of the child and the right of the parent in terms of tensions between ‘social rights’ and ‘private autonomy rights’. Despite differences in detail, the iterations of the universal right to education do share to the full in the idea of education as such. In the second part the attempt to scrutinize the underlying assumptions legitimizing the consensus on education, focusing again on the notion of the child. In conclusion I argue that a certain notion of what it is to be a human being is inscribed within the circle of access to rights and education. These notions of what it means to be a child, a parent, a citizen or a member of the ‘human family’ are notions of enlightenment and humanity and, to my understanding, aspects of how democracy is configured around freedom, equality and fraternity. (shrink)

The question raised in this paper is whether legal rights to vote are also moral rights to vote. The challenge to the justification of a moral right to vote is that it is not clear that the vote is instrumental to the preservation of some critical interest of the voter. Because a single vote has ‘no impact’ on electoral outcomes, the right to vote is unlikely to serve the interests of the individual. The account developed in this paper holds that (...) moral voting rights can be justified once we acknowledge that voting by a sub-set of citizens is among the necessary preconditions for democratic institutions making a significant difference to their collective interests. The justification of a moral right to vote does not, then, apply to each individual citizen but only to a sub-set of them. In order to justify inclusive moral voting rights, the further consideration must be added that individuals have critical interests in public recognition of equal status. An inclusive moral right to vote accordingly depends on both collective interest in the outcomes of democratic institutions and on individual interest in equal recognition. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.

In this thesis I defend the principle of global egalitarianism. According to this idea most of the existing detrimental inequalities in this world are morally objectionable. As detrimental inequalities I understand those that are not to the benefit of the worst off people and that can be non-wastefully removed. To begin with, I consider various justifications of the idea that only those detrimental inequalities that occur within one and the same state are morally objectionable. I identify Thomas Nagel’s approach as (...) the most promising defence of this traditional position. However, I also show that Nagel’s argument does not even justify the elimination of detrimental inequalities within states. A discussion of the concept of political legitimacy rather shows that egalitarian justice is not a necessary condition of the justifiability of the exercise of coercive political power. I, then, consider other, more Rawlsian approaches to the question of detrimental inequalities. These views appear more plausible than Nagel’s position and argue that egalitarian duties also arise in certain international contexts. But also these more global theories of distributive justice suffer from shortcomings. Since they make the application of duties of justice dependent on the existence of social practices they cannot adequately account for the justified interests of non-participants that are affected by these practices. The counter-intuitive implications of practice-dependent theories lead me to investigate the plausibility of a theory that does not limit justice to existing practices and that argues for the inherent value of equality. This theory is global egalitarianism. I defend global egalitarianism by debilitating three objections that opponents of this idea frequently present in the relevant literature. Finally I also address two particular objections to the idea that global egalitarian duties are institutionalizable with the help of coercive global authorities. (shrink)

In my view, the moral case for giving animals legal protection is strong. This is so whether or not we think of animals as having moral rights, such as a right to be cared for, or at least a right not to be harmed, because even if animals do not have moral rights, humans have moral duties toward animals, such as a general duty not to harm animals, say, by performing experiments on them, or raising them for food, or having (...) them perform tricks to amuse tourists. The question I wish to consider in this article, however, is not what moral rights animals have, or even what our moral duties to animals are, but whether we have reason to think of animal law not only as imposing legal duties on humans, but also as conferring legal rights on animals. This is not a moral question, but a question about how to conceptualize legal positions, and the arguments in favor of or against competing conceptualizations should be of a theoretical nature. Although the focus of legal scholars is only rarely on conceptual questions, such questions are nevertheless important. For having a reasonably thought-out view of the structure, content, and applicability of relevant legal concepts will be conducive to clear legal thinking, and clear legal thinking in turn is conducive not only to correct legal thinking, but also to efficiency. I shall argue that while there are good moral reasons to impose legal duties on humans regarding the treatment of animals, there are good theoretical reasons not to think of animals as legal right-holders, because doing so would either be pointless, on the interest-theory analysis, or else incoherent, on the will-theory analysis. On route to this conclusion, I shall also argue that in the field of law, the method of explication is in many cases, including the elucidation of the concept of a legal right, preferable to conceptual analysis, strictly conceived; that we should think of legal rights as complexes of Hohfeld-elements and distinguish accordingly between claim-rights, liberty-rights, power-rights, and immunity-rights; that when discussing animal rights we should focus on claim-rights; and, finally, that an explication of the concept of a legal right along the lines of the will-theory of legal rights is preferable to an explication along the lines of the interest-theory. (shrink)

In some cases, the U.S. should adopt a policy of assassinating national leaders. On just war theory, national leaders are sometimes combatants. This is because some leaders are both causal and logical agents of an unjust military campaign. Such leaders occupy this logical role because in some cases their position has an essential link to their nation’s military projects. In addition, such a policy aligns with some of the policies that motivate just war theory in that assassination does not target (...) innocent persons, is connected to self-defense, and does not violate any international agreements. Just war theory should probably be rejected, however, since it rests on dubious claims about the non-contractual essentialist conditions of combatant. On a self-defense theory, some national leaders may be killed because they are threats. They are threats because they originate a causal process that will likely bring about large amounts of unjust harm. In so doing, they forfeit those moral rights that protect them against injurious action and thus remove one of the major constraints against violence and killing. On a consequentialist theory, such a policy would likely bring about the best consequences since it would be a vital tool in the protection against genocide, unjust military aggression, and other horrendous state actions that have characterized the twentieth century. It is unlikely that the harm that would result from such a policy (e.g., its misuse) would outweigh the expected gain from it. (shrink)